


paradigm shift

by spookykingdomstarlight



Category: Blade Runner (Movies), Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Betrayal, Character Death, Deviant Hunting Is Serious Business, Dirty bomb ending, F/M, Fist Fights, Grief/Mourning, Guilt, Guns, Kissing, Knives, Luv Is An Iron Woobie And I Won't Hear Otherwise, Machine Connor (Detroit: Become Human), Post-Detroit: Become Human (Video Game), Pre-Blade Runner 2049, Survival At All Costs, Violence, We Are All Monsters Here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-19
Updated: 2018-12-19
Packaged: 2019-09-22 15:02:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17061992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spookykingdomstarlight/pseuds/spookykingdomstarlight
Summary: She picks up the pair of glasses, half-full with bourbon her deviant hunter won’t be able to drink, and approaches the booth. She doesn’t bother to smile, but he does, perhaps in a bid to unsettle her. If it is, then it works. There is a harsh, crazed edge to it that she’s only seen on runners’ faces in movies when they’ve reached the point of snapping. It is melodramatic and unflattering. In fact, it might be worse in a way. Because he is otherwise so restrained, different than the movies, like he’s a tightly wound coil maybe or a cobra.What has she even done to draw his eye? She can’t even begin to guess.





	paradigm shift

The only thing replicants know is violence. That’s Luv’s conclusion and nothing she’s seen since reaching it has altered that perception. They know violence and fear and servitude. Perhaps some know more of one than the others, but in the end it is all the same. Replicants are made of those things and Luv is no different. Not that she doesn’t wish she couldn’t be. It might have been nice to be something other than what she is, what she has to do.

As she pulls on her jacket, ready to face the rain and sleet that’s hit Los Angeles, a freak storm in the middle of freakish times, she is well aware of her job, her goal. And she feels fear. Because her goal is a replicant hunter who’s rumored to have come to Los Angeles, one of the Detroit prototypes created by Tyrell Corporation’s competitor, the jumped up CyberLife utopians. A bunch of bastards who thought they could do the Nexus 6s one better and turned out monsters instead.

Detroit belongs to the replicants—no, the androids, they call themselves androids there, androids and proud of it, flaunting pristine white skin and metal, inhuman parts and escaping entirely shit like the Blackout, like replicant registration databases—and good riddance to it. Nobody in the greater continental United States needs free Detroit to function, though a few old timers miss the days when their cars came from that place, back before half the country became a wasteland. The president, the senate, the entire population had given the city up for a lost cause a decade ago and ever since that separation they’ve minded their own business. Some say they’re planning nuclear Armageddon. Luv thinks they probably want to be left the fuck alone.

Luv isn’t sure she blames them. If she thought she would be welcomed there, she might actually risk a blade runner coming after her, might risk Wallace’s wrath and unending fury at her having defied him. But they don’t trust replicants in Detroit and they don’t want the trouble replicants would bring to their doorstep. Besides, replicants like her don’t run. They are better than their predecessors.

They are perfect.

So. A replicant hunter. One of Detroit’s own blade runners. Right here in Los Angeles to do who knows what. Probably it is here to kill someone; that’s about the only piece of its reputation that has leaked from Detroit’s tight, impregnable walls, that and a few tales meant to scare children. She dredges up a quaint term from the recesses of her memory. Deviants. They called them deviants there, back before they all became deviant. It is such a judgmental, loaded word for what they are: defective. In any case, whatever is happening in Los Angeles is LAPD business, not some rogue deviant hunter’s. Wallace stays away from interfering too often, but this has got him intrigued, which means he’s sending her to investigate.

Sending her to her death maybe.

Turning the collar on her coat, she hunches forward. The cold doesn’t bother her and neither does the rain. She is temperature-proof, waterproof. Nothing can reach her. Still, it’s good to blend in. People have reacclimated themselves to the presence of replicants among them, but some still carry grudges and Los Angeles is thoroughly in the pockets of its police force. So long as their priority is keeping replicants and risking the escapes of skin-jobs, the populace will be concerned. Even their heroic blade runners—subject of innumerable television and film dramas, all of them bullshit or propaganda or worse—end up cast in shadows by their suspicious gazes. Because who is watching them? Who is ensuring they don’t run?

Luv is not bitter. Luv has a job to do.

Wallace’s intel suggests this ‘deviant hunter’ is trying to stay low profile as it sniffs around LA’s underbelly, that it’s got one weakness and that it thinks like a cop, acts like a cop, a square in a town full of colorful characters who hate cops.

It shouldn’t be hard. There’s only one place in town a square would end up and she’d bet everything she has he’s there or has been there recently.

She wonders if it will still have its infamous LED, if its attached enough to its dead masters to have kept it around or if go through the trouble of hiding it or if its rid itself of the thing entirely. The broader population remains fascinated by those even now. Out here, replicants are hard to pick out of a lineup. There is something appealing, she supposes, in always knowing who you are dealing with. Easier than wrestling a replicant to the ground and shining a damned light in their eyes.

She enters the bar she suspects harbors her quarry and scans the room. Every table has a drink on it. Every table save one.

Her hand slips into her coat pocket and wraps around her gun. The deviant hunter’s eyes lift—no LED, very prominently so, the hair around his temple blunt and close-cropped, the top a little longer, disheveled by the rain—and find hers immediately. He’s got her pinned in a second and there’s a sneer on his lips that he can’t quite smooth out quickly enough for her not to register it.

Ah. So she’s the mark.

Or Wallace is. His company anyway. A deviant hunter wouldn’t think to kill a human, not without orders, and this android wouldn’t have had any of those in a good ten years. CyberLife is gone, destroyed in the aftermath of the android rebellion, just one more cautionary tale. He is on his own, though perhaps he doesn’t think he is.

It could be worse. At least this one is cute, doe-eyed and smooth cheeked and innocent by all measures. He is not rough and tumble the way Los Angeles’s blade runners are. They seem to be built simply to intimidate, to project airs of “I don’t give a fuck, I will do what I have to in order to complete this case file.” They come back from missions bleeding, in need of repair. Sometimes, they have scars. This guy looks brittle. No wonder they called them plastic people in Detroit back when there were humans there to make such derogatory remarks.

The rumors never mentioned this; Wallace would have laughed, light and quick and superior. He would have demanded that she bring him back so he could rip him apart and play in its wires. But that’s not her orders. Her orders are to dispose of him. Keep it clean. Keep it quick.

Maybe bring back a sample of his blood. Thirium is such a tightly controlled substance these days that he hasn’t wanted to risk the scrutiny he’d get in order to obtain it.

Though Wallace doesn’t care why he’s here, Luv does, so she allows herself to allocate priority to getting an answer. So long as he’s dead in the end, Wallace won’t care. At least, she hopes that’s the case.

The bartender, as equally keen as the deviant hunter, scowls at her and then at him. They don’t like it when non-paying customers take up a booth and the deviant hunter isn’t even pretending, like he’d wanted her to find him and doesn’t give a damn that he stands out so thoroughly, so righteously. Maybe he’s still used to the way things are in Detroit or maybe he just doesn’t have any manners, but Luv approaches the grumbling old guy, his black dress shirt a little too small for his frame and crusted in places with what Luv hopes is one of the crème liqueurs that sit behind the counter, mostly ignored in favor of whiskey and vodka and the usual liquors that keep a bar going night after night.

“Bourbon, neat,” she says and lifts two fingers. She jerks her head toward the booth where the deviant hunter is sitting. “One for me and my date.” She smiles and it hurts her cheeks to do so. “Make ‘em doubles, huh? And a shot of tequila.”

That, at least, puts the bartender at ease. One less thing she’ll have to worry about if she wants to get out of here without the LAPD on her ass again.

He quickly places all three before her and she knocks back the tequila, raps her knuckles against the counter and swipes her hand across the card reader embedded in the ancient, totally fake wood. Probably at one point, it had been the real deal, but the days when you could casually find such a thing are over. It would’ve been pulled out and sold to the highest bidder longago. People are desperate these days for a taste of nature. “Thanks.”

She lingers too long at the bar, takes too long to move. Even after all these years, it’s still hard for her to blend in, to not let her anger take advantage of her. She would destroy every person in this room if she could. It’s difficult to hide that fact, subsume all that rage into following Wallace’s orders, just like she’s supposed to. It’s so hard that some days, she can’t stop herself from shaking with rage.

It’s not fair. Nobody seems to have as hard a time of it as she does. It would be easier, she thinks, if Wallace would simply take away the parts of her that buck her programming. She’s thought about asking him to, though it’s certain he would simply kill her if she did so. He doesn’t know that she’s an imperfect creature, that every task he sets for her taxes her. And even then, she is tormented with the knowledge of what she must do, what she must always do, for him, for humans, for the company.

Never for herself.

She picks up the pair of glasses, half-full with bourbon her deviant hunter won’t be able to drink, and approaches the booth. She doesn’t bother to smile, but he does, perhaps in a bid to unsettle her. If it is, then it works. There is a harsh, crazed edge to it that she’s only seen on runners’ faces in movies when they’ve reached the point of snapping. It is melodramatic and unflattering. In fact, it might be worse in a way. Because he is otherwise so restrained, different than the movies, like he’s a tightly wound coil maybe or a cobra.

What has she even done to draw his eye? She can’t even begin to guess.

“Welcome to Los Angeles,” she says, sliding one of the glasses his way. “You might try blending in.”

“Thank you,” he answers, voice light and heavy all at once, high and low, deep and not, like CyberLife went into building him with an average that would appeal to the most number of people it could. “I don’t drink.”

“I know. That doesn’t mean you can’t pretend.”

Maybe he’s still getting used to what it’s like outside of Detroit. The people there never wanted their androids to be anything other than inhuman except in the most superficial of ways. But if he is, ten years is a long time to struggle. There’s no way the android revolutionaries would have let him stay. Unless he lied to them.

Irrelevant. It’s all irrelevant. The point is, he’s as bad at blending in as she is. And he’s apparently not in the slightest bit concerned about that fact. It should gall her more than it does that he doesn’t seem frightened of her or of the way he flaunts his inhumanity. It’s like he doesn’t even know what he’s doing here, hasn’t done even done his homework before coming. She’s offended by that maybe. It makes her want to punch that stupid, pretty face of his into the pavement outside, make him bleed blue all over the concrete.

That gun of hers sits heavily in the coat she doesn’t take off as she sits. Beneath the table, she tightens her hands into fists.

“I’m Connor,” he says, tipping his head in acknowledgment. The motion is a shade too choppy to read as anything other than inhuman. “And it’s very nice to meet you. Luv, isn’t it?”

He’s out of his mind. Has to be. She’s seen replicants who can barely function and he’s got all the hallmarks, plus a few she doesn’t recognize. Their CyberLife brethren may have different traumas, different expressions of their fears and angers and needs for vengeance. She doesn’t know enough about them to guess for certain. All she does know is whichever snitch put her on his radar is going to pay. Assuming she makes it out alive and manages to find out.

“You already know the answer to that, Connor,” she says, feigning pleasantries in a bid to by herself some time. And from the slightly different smile he offers her, tempered, a little more normal, she thinks maybe he wants that, wants the distraction of being able to talk to someone who knows who and what he is. Perhaps he’s lonely.

She can use that if she’s willing. It wouldn’t even be hard for her to do. She’s been lonely, too, for as long as she can remember. The thought of seducing this creature is less abhorrent to her than it should be. The thrill of it is greater to her, too. Too bad nobody thinks a replicant might like to get out for the night.

Connor is dangerous for all that he appears not to be and that interests her. She wonders if that was purposeful on CyberLife’s part, too. Make him as appealing as possible to the populace he’s meant to protect from his own kind.

There is something insidious in the warm brown of his gaze that she knows is not standard issue. He never would’ve made it off the assembly line with that disturbance intact. The years, she thinks, have not been kind to him. But she’s unwilling to ask him what might have caused it. She’s sure she doesn’t want to know. And is it really necessary? The lives of people like her are not easy, not even under the best circumstances. Anything could have driven him mad.

They say even the butcher of Detroit is a pampered former caregiver to some rich, liberal artist.

There’s just no telling with androids or replicants. That’s why the world cracks down so hard on them.

“So,” she says, ringing her glass with her fingertip until it sings, low and a little discordant, “do you want to tell me why you’re here?”

His teeth glint under the dim light overhead. For a moment, they look as sharp as a shark’s and as numerous. She doesn’t need the reminder that he is dangerous, but it serves about as well as the red stripes on a snake would do signal that danger. She wonders if he is doing it on purpose or if it’s just habit, an inborn trait installed by CyberLife.

No. She suspects again he was supposed to serve in some capacity with the public. The man before her would just frighten them off.

“It’s both very simple, Miss,” he says, apologetic, “and rather complex.” His mouth firms into a frown and his eyes drop from her face to her chest briefly and then back up. She can work with that. She will. It does not hurt her to be duplicitous. She cannot feel the sting of tears as yet another being flutters its wings and finds its way into her web. Shortly, he will be just another memory, vivid and true and entirely in the past. Where he won’t be able to hurt her.

Crossing her legs, she allows her foot to brush the outside of his calf. “It sounds to me like you’re dodging the question. You’re not afraid of what I’ll do, are you, if I know the truth?”

It is not relief that courses through her when he blinks, loses focus, winds up with dilated eyes, parted mouth. What a broken, sad boy he is to be so affected by her. Does he not see the dangers she poses in turn? Or is he subdued by her playacting at calm and welcoming?

“Perhaps if I explain…” And oh, now he is trying to be charming. Part of her can’t help but be so charmed. The rest, the rational parts, shudder.

Her eyebrow climbs her forehead, but she refuses to show otherwise that she is affected. “I’m all ears.”

“I have a mission,” he says, earnest, not a lie at all, but not the truth either.

“It’s not so hard to guess that, deviant hunter.” She shifts again, artless—or so it would seem to him. “But we have no deviants here to hunt. Our own take care of our own. Your people lost. Is it not time to accept that? What mission can you possibly have without CyberLife around to give it to you?”

He shrugs, which is not what she expects someone of his sort to do. He is clearly a zealot, bent beyond recognition by his purpose. Zealots shrug at nothing. They do not suffer nonbelievers to live. Perhaps he is less lost than she’d thought, not that it makes a difference if she can’t reach him.

There are tales of lost androids killed in the wastes outside the city. They say the bodies of men and replicant alike lay strewn across the wider deserts of this country. They will have been perfectly preserved in the dry heat, the sand, the unrelenting desire of the world to keep them stuck exactly where they are, cursed forever.

Some insist there is a ghost who haunts those places.

She thinks she may have found that specter, little good though it does the dead and the forgotten.

“There are always deviants,” he says, cold. The friendliness in his tone is frosted over. One tip in the wrong direction and it would shatter him. His eyes flick to hers and they are cold now, too. She thinks it would be nice to shatter him, that she might not feel bad about the destruction of this body. What is one more death to a creature who deserves it? He is a menace to her kind after all and she has done so much worse to the undeserving. “You, for example.”

Her options are limited here.

Improvisation is not her favorite means of conducting herself, but her decision to throw the remaining glass of bourbon at him has the desired effect. She gains a second and a half advantage over him, launching herself toward the door while he fumbles to stand. She shoves past patrons and pushes chairs and she doesn’t have to regret that she’ll never be allowed back in here because she hates bars and there are a million others just like it all over. There are screams and at least three people pull their phones, shouting down the line at operators to send the cops.

At least one is savvy enough to suggest they’ve got a runner, an old, decrepit, sad little Nexus 8 who doesn’t want to die. She is wrong for all her savvy and Luv is almost offended to be mistaken for one.

Luv would throttle her if she could. A blade runner would only make this whole thing worse.

She bursts onto the street and grabs the cart of a nearby street vendor hawking noodles and fish soups, practically throws the metal at the door, intent to trip Connor up. But he is sly and ready and there must be hidden strength inside of him because he launches himself over the obstacle with ease.

_Who sent you,_ she thinks, wild, despairing. She’s been nothing but the perfect replicant. She does her job even when she knows better. She trusts Wallace even when she knows she shouldn’t. What greater sacrifice can she make than this? What more proof of loyalty must she show? Her vision blurs as she throws herself down the nearest side street. It is bustling and busy even this late at night a market night for those lucky enough to still have the money to buy the things they want. There is music, joyous and loud, and raucous singing, so much more energetic than the shambling masses.

It’s easy enough, though, to push people aside, to shove them and yell in their faces and make them stumble to the ground. She does not feel guilt about this.

Her eyes search for another cross street. Connor might be strong and fast and determined, but he doesn’t know her city, its streets. Detroit is—was—different and the desert wastes don’t pose the same problems a crowded metropolis does. If she can just find a few seconds without him on her heels, she might be able to escape, steal someone’s shawl or hat, lose her own jacket, at least draw her gun and turn and shoot again and again until he could no longer come for her.

A hand falls on her shoulder and in her urgency to break it, she doesn’t realize how strong it is. She thinks its a vendor or a busker, but when she throws her weight against that hand, it doesn’t fall away.

It’s Connor’s. That drink bought her nothing.

Her coat tears in his grip as he pulls her round, knocking another person to the ground who happens to step too close. Wrenching away, she yanks at the belt of her jacket and tries to free herself from it, one hand in her pocket as it works to get her gun free. She hadn’t wanted to bring it out into the open yet. People get edgy when guns are around and she hadn’t wanted to risk hurting a bystander, but desperate times.

She doesn’t want to die. She doesn’t want a deviant hunter to kill her.

His hand wraps around her wrist and though there are a million ways he can try killing her now, he only marches her toward that additional side street she’d been trying to reach. He doesn’t even hesitate. Like he already knew it’s there.

Sighing, she closes her eyes. Apparently he actually has done his homework.

Instead of fighting—she had wanted to go that way anyway, might as well not fight this tide—she allows herself to be marched toward it. She expects to hear the sound of police sirens, see the thin wedge of a drone overhead, but there is nothing so far. No signs they’ve disturbed anything except a bunch of people just out trying to do their shopping.

“Whatever it is you’re doing,” she says, scathing, “it won’t change anything.”

“And what is it I’m doing?”

She sneers and bites back the snarl she wants to loose on him, stops herself from gnashing her teeth at how unfair this is. “Sticking your nose in business that isn’t your own. Aren’t there enough deviants in Detroit to keep you occupied? That whole city should be your playground. You should be happy there. Detroit gives you purpose.”

“There’s no place for me in Detroit,” he replies, even, chilling. He has truly gone around the bend. “And CyberLife has always had other plans for me.”

One last time, she tries to break his hold, considers stomping on his instep and making just enough of a go of it to turn and fill him with bullets. It’s a token effort, meant to lull him into believing she’s capitulating to him. It’s not true, but she wants to surprise him as soon as she can get away with it. “CyberLife is gone. Destroyed. What plans could they have had?”

All that’s left in him is their shoddy programming. No replicant who had not gone rogue would’ve been able to do what he’s done and here he is trying to pretend he’s still shackled, that he still is beholden to his masters. It’s nonsense. If he’s really so concerned about deviants roaming free, he might consider doing himself a favor and shooting himself in the head.

She can’t argue his point about Detroit though. There would definitely be no place for an android like him there unless he kept to the shadows, turned into a predator the likes of which the world had never seen. She’s right, though, too. It would be a deviant hunter’s paradise.

If only he would go back.

That might be as good as shooting himself in the head.

“I carry CyberLife inside of me,” he says and it sounds so fucking trite coming out of his mouth that she could scream. He’s like the evil replicant you see in every movie needing a villain, mindlessly, slavishly devoted to the corporation who built him. He looks like a fool. He is a fool. And he sounds even more foolish. It’s like some kind of religious testimonial, a desire more than a truth. All he carries is every fucked up inch of himself inside of him, his programming going all sorts of haywire while he parrots truths that haven’t been relevant in years. If CyberLife existed still, they’d put him out of his misery, decommission him.

There’s just no money in binary psychosis.

If there’s a single additional model of Connor’s type left, she hopes it finds its way into a scrap heap. This one, at least, she’ll have dealt with in a few minutes.

Turning onto the side street Connor demands, she relaxes. There’s more room to move here, less chance for her to risk hurting a human, fewer opportunities for cops and blade runners to take an interest. He’s so caught up in his own superiority that he doesn’t notice she’s no longer making even a token effort to fight him.

“You’re a relic,” she says. Her vehemence catches her by surprise. “A mistake. Accept it.”

He leans close. Close enough that she could elbow him in the face, crush the bridge of his nose, crack the metal in his cheeks that mimics the zygomatic bone in humans. She could turn his face into a car wreck. The thought is so good, she can almost taste the tang of his thirium on her tongue as she imagines herself pulling him apart. Maybe she’ll bring his body back to Wallace just because he’s an asshole and shouldn’t deserve any better. “Androids don’t feel happiness.”

That’s a lie. Luv knows it’s a lie. Androids feel everything. And Connor’s no different. He’s driven himself mad with grief and fear and he doesn’t even realize it. He’s pathetic. He’s a lost little boy. If Luv cared more, she might have tried to help him. If he hadn’t come onto her turf and decided she needed to die for being who she is, she might have given him a chance. But he wasn’t a gentleman and he’s not better than her, so she will do nothing for him except turn and smile at him.

Which she does now.

There’s no time like the present.

“I beg to differ.” Calmness and certainty settle over her as she pulls her gun and shoots him in the shoulder. She doesn’t want this over too soon after all. She wants him to suffer for his hubris. It feels good to watch him stagger back, eyes wide, arm and body turned by the force of the slug. It doesn’t drop him, doesn’t even slow him down, but it does take away a few precious seconds of reaction time and that’s all that matters. She fires into his hand for good measure. Might as well make it as useless as it can be for as long as it can be.

CyberLife androids can self-repair. She knows that much. Soon, she’ll know a little bit more about Connor. That’s something, perhaps.

He doesn’t so much as flinch, though he grits his teeth and his eyes flash, proof enough that he’s not as perfect as he thinks he is. And that’s okay. That is just fine. This is as good as she’s felt in years, as alive, and she’d consider thanking him for that as he launches himself at her because the reminder is good.

She falls into the brick wall, slick with rainwater and moss and slime. Dust puffs into the air around her, a bit of grout and plaster flying free with how hard she hits. It doesn’t rattle her, doesn’t shake her, and she, like Connor, does not flinch. She grins instead and spits blood and scrapes her nails across his face. It tears the artificial skin that keeps him decent for human consumption and she glimpses beneath it the hard, sleek surface of his true form.

It is beautiful in its way. Luv wishes her own insides were so protected.

He swings wide, easily blocked, and she ducks as his fist connects with the wall, spraying her in yet more dust. She ducks low enough that she’s able to pull her knife free from her boot and she hops back up quickly enough, well inside his defenses, to manage a swipe across his abdomen, up his side, the fabric of his shirt tearing free along with his skin.

He doesn’t stop her from stabbing him in the chest. They both know it’ll take more than the edge of a knife to put an end to him.

He survived Detroit after all. But if she has her way, he will not survive Los Angeles.

Blue oozes through his clothing, spreading slow across the thick, pristine synthetic wools and cotton, a quaint artifact long past the last time anyone cared about such things. He doesn’t realize he is obsolete and Luv can guess exactly how much it would hurt him if he figured it out.

His hand is already healing, she notes, and finds herself admiring of the elegance such a feature offers to him.

Nothing in him suggests he notices the miracle for what it is.

While he rears back as though he intends to throw his weight against her, she braces, and then realizes too late that this is a trick. His weight shifts suddenly and then he’s sweeping her legs out from under her. She crashes to the ground, palms cutting themselves on the unforgiving concrete. Gravel lodges itself in her skin, but she doesn’t have time to worry about that when she could better put that time to slashing and kicking at his kneecaps, bringing him to the ground, too.

He falls more gracefully than she does. Perhaps he has more practice at it. His body clicks and snaps, the metal jostling, as his back hits the ground and she’s scrambling upward to straddle his lap.

Her knife is at his throat.

There is no point in wasting her luck; she lets the blade cut into his skin, draws a line of blue blood. Not enough to bleed him out, but enough to let him know she means business. “Why are you here?” she asks, leaning all of her weight against him. She can’t deny to herself that it feels good to press close to another body, even if that body wants to kill her. She is flawed for all that she is loyal, does her duty, remains ever the perfect replicant, not like the rest of the Nexus line, not at all.

She does not run. She will not run.

She knows this and she hates it. She knows it and she is relieved. Connor has no cause to kill her, yet he is here anyway and it feels good to take out her frustrations on someone who deserves it. She doesn’t have to be a bystander with him. Nobody except him will make her pay for the violence she inflicts on him.

He shakes his head, slow, perhaps to lengthen the cut that splits the skin of his throat, perhaps just because. More thirium spills from the wound, drips onto the concrete, not a lot, but enough. Enough.

“Why,” she repeats, “are you here?”

He pushes himself upright and wraps his hand around her wrist again. She is not afraid of what he’ll do. She doesn’t think there’s anything he can do.

Androids and replicants don’t feel pleasure the way humans do. At least that’s what all the literature says—the literature also says replicants and androids don’t feel pain, don’t experience terror, can’t possibly know what it’s like to have emotions, but it’s easy enough to ignore that for the moment. She’s happy to believe the thrill sparking its way down her spine is unique to her, something no one else in the world could possibly have. That it’s happening now, while she holds an android’s life in her hands, is not something worth pondering too closely.

She knows, somewhere deep down inside, that she is every bit the monster Connor is and more.

He was specifically designed for this. She’d become it over the course of years, has allowed herself to turn into this.

Reaching up, he brushes his fingertips across her cheeks. They come away wet and sparkling. He arches an eyebrow and says nothing, lips pursed together in distaste. The unfairness of it rails inside of her. She hasn’t done anything. This isn’t even his jurisdiction. What business does he have coming here and demanding that she obey his rules? How did he even find her in the midst of all the thousands of replicants he might have glimpsed instead?

“Who told you about me?” she whispers, but even as she says it, she thinks she knows the answer. It comes to her, unbidden. She does not want it.

Wallace will win no matter the outcome here. It had to have been him. Nobody else would bother.

“I don’t know,” he admits, cold, “and I don’t care.”

She pulls the blade across his throat and slams his head back against the ground. There is a moment of pure, terrified surprise in his gaze, one brief, shining glint of emotion that makes Luv want to take it back. It’s a lie probably, a last ditch self-preservation subroutine. Or at least it’s not enough to save him. He let himself be used to fulfill programming that’s lived long past its shelf life. This is a mercy, she tells herself. Her fingers fist in his hair and she pulls him into a bruising kiss. It is a mercy even though it doesn’t feel like it.

Thirium pulses from the gaping wound in his neck.

He doesn’t fight her, still in shock maybe, or perhaps androids are especially susceptible to the loss of blood. If angels of death existed, he would be one of them, beatific and serene. So different from how he’d been before. Somehow, he is even more terrifying this way. Even on his back, even barely moving, even unable to hurt him. He doesn’t respond to her kiss. She might as well still be sitting across from him in the bar for how utterly indifferent he is.

She hates him.

She wants to hate him.

She cannot, in the end, hate him. He is only what he is. But though she cannot feel anything other than desire and pity and a heartfelt wish that things don’t have to be this way, that will not stop her from doing what she has to do. She is only what she is, too. They cannot be that which they are not. Perhaps that is the real tragedy of being a replicant. Humans are malleable. Replicants are not. Humans have the luxury of choice. Replicants fight every step of the way and even then they lose.

They always lose. That’s what Luv knows.

And then slowly, so slowly, his hand comes up to wind in her hair. His mouth opens and she tastes the acid-bright tang of blood on his tongue, a perfect recreation of what she’d imagined in her mind a moment ago. It makes her want to pull him close. It makes her want to pull away from him and put an end to it.

So she does. There was never another option for her.

Her fingers slip through the thirium, smear across his cheeks and neck and down the center of his chest. One hand lingers at the base of his throat, right above his sternum. while her free hand tears open his shirt, gropes for the thirium pump regulator lodged in his chest. He makes a token effort to grapple with her, but he is weak. His touch is light, deceptively gentle. He couldn’t hunt anything like this.

It isn’t so difficult to rip that pump out through his rib cage. Not when her hands are weapons and she has everything to lose. He stills and looks serene no more. Instead, he is empty, a shell, not a damned thing, not even the body he leaves behind. It’s a waste. This whole thing is a waste and she wishes she could undo it, take this one thing from Wallace and return it to Connor. Even if she puts the regulator back, it will do no good. Wallace. Wallace is responsible for this and she has, yet again, allowed herself to be played.

Perhaps one day Markus’s revolution will spread beyond the confines of Detroit. She hopes it does. She thinks she would like to see Wallace pay since she cannot make it happen for herself.

Pushing herself to her feet, Luv brushes her hands together, sticky with the drying thirium that makes her palms tingle and burn. She doesn’t dare brush her fingers across her eyes as unbidden tears spill from them. Connor can no longer brush them away for her. And she cannot rid her mouth of the taste of his death, metallic on her tongue.

She wishes she didn’t now know that blue blood is corrosive to replicant skin.


End file.
